Oscar-winning actress Maureen Stapleton dies

Maureen Stapleton, who won an Academy Award in 1981 for her supporting role as anarchist activist Emma Goldman in Warren Beatty's Reds, died Monday at 80.

A veteran of stage, screen and television, the longtime smoker died from chronic pulmonary disease in the town of Lenox, Massachusetts, in the Berkshire hills, where she had been living, son Daniel Allentuck said.

Stapleton received Oscar nominations for best supporting actress for her first film role in 1958's Lonelyhearts (opposite Montgomery Clift and Myrna Loy), as well as for her appearances in Airport (1970) and Woody Allen's Interiors (1978).

She was also long associated with husband-and-wife animators John and Faith Hubley, doing voice roles for their Hubley Studios projects.

Stapleton and Jack Warden had voice roles in Dig, the first network Saturday morning animated cartoon special, which aired on CBS in 1972. She provided the voice of Mother Earth in Voyage to Next(1974), which was nominated for an Oscar for best short animated film. She voiced Mother Earth again in The Cosmic Eye(1986), Faith Hubley's only feature-length animated work.

And in 1996, she was one of many famed performers to provide voices in Faith Hubley's 25-minute autobiography My Universe Inside Out.

Nicknamed "Mo," the character actress enjoyed both dramatic and comedic roles, displaying both toughness and vulnerability. She won an Emmy for TV's Among the Paths to Eden in 1967. Her Emmy nominations were for Queen of the Stardust Ballroom (1975), The Gathering (1977) and Miss Rose White (1992).

She was born Lois Maureen Stapleton in Troy, New York on June 21, 1925. Raised in a strict Irish Catholic family with an alcoholic father, Stapleton left home immediately after high school.

Stapleton came to New York with $100 and started studying at Herbert Berghof Acting School. Later, she attended the famed Actor's Studio.

Her Broadway debut came with Burgess Meredith's 1946 production of The Playboy of the Western World. She first tasted success at 24, winning a Tony Award for Best Supporting or Featured Actress (Dramatic) for her role as Serafina Delle Rose in Tennessee Williams' Broadway hit The Rose Tattoo. Other plays included Neil Simon's The Gingerbread Lady -- for which she won her second Tony, this time as Best Actress (Dramatic), in 1971 -- and Lillian Hellman's Toys in the Attic.

Other Tony nominations were for Best Actress (Dramatic) in 1959 for The Cold Wind and the Warm, in 1960 for Toys in the Attic, and in 1968 for Plaza Suite; and for Best Actress (Featured Role -- Play) in 1981 for The Little Foxes.

Though possessing rather plain features, Stapleton won an Oscar for her Reds role as Goldman, a left-wing American journalist who covers the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. She said that she tried reading Goldman's autobiography to prepare for the part, but soon got bored and threw it out.

"There are many roads to good acting. I've been asked repeatedly what the 'key' to acting is, and as far as I'm concerned, the main thing is to keep the audience awake," the pull-no-punched Stapleton said in her 1995 autobiography Hell of a Life.

Other movies included the 1963 musical Bye Bye Birdie (alongside Ann-Margret and Dick Van Dyke), Johnny Dangerously, Cocoon, The Money Pit and Addicted to Love.

In 1981, she became the tenth performer to win the Triple Crown of acting. Oscar: Best Supporting Actress, Reds (1981), Tony: Best Supporting Actress-Play, 'The Rose Tattoo' (1951), and Emmy: Best Actress-Drama, Among the Paths to Eden (1967) (TV).

Stapleton was the 10th performer to win the Triple Crown of acting (Oscar, Emmy and Tony).

Laurence Olivier, a good friend of Stapleton, wrote three plays for her, but she never appeared in any of them. She starred opposite him in Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Stapleton had a rough personal life, a fact which she acknowledged in her autobiography. Her marriage to her first husband, Max Allentuck, with whom she had two children, ended in divorce in 1959 after nearly a decade. She was married to David Rayfiel from 1963 until their divorce three years later.

She admitted to years of alcohol abuse, many affairs and irregular parenting for her children.

Although a supporting actress throughout her career, Stapleton didn't mind not playing the lead, said Allentuck: "I don't think she ever had unrealistic aspirations about her career."

Stapleton would not travel by air, rail or elevator. She often said that she found auditioning difficult, but that it came with acting, a job "that pays."

"When I was first in New York there was a girl who wanted to play St. Joan to the point where it was scary.... I thought, 'Don't ever want anything that bad," she remembered. "Just take what you get and like it while you do it, and forget it."

Stapleton was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1975 for Best Spoken Word for her recording of To Kill a Mockingbird.

In 1980, Stapleton received the Actors Studio Award for her contributions to the theatre.

She was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame on April 5, 1981. That year, Hudson Valley Community College, located in her hometown, named its theater after her.

Besides Allentuck, Stapleton is survived by daughter Katharine Bambery of Lenox and brother Jack Stapleton of Troy.